Sabrina Ratté’s "Floralia", 2021, as seen in Echoes from the Future (2023), curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Virtual reality for headsets and desktop.
Art games, expanded reality, and other interactive media art forms offer exciting immersive and participatory experiences for audiences.
With this potential comes a number of challenges for organizations who often need to find new methods to share such works with their audiences. Exhibiting interactive media forces the organizer to think like a designer. This notebook covers broad design strategies for working with common interactive media and platforms.
The most valuable tool in your designer toolkit is empathy. Before you begin planning your exhibition, or possibly even before selecting the featured work, consider your audience. Who is the person who will be experiencing the interaction? Does the interaction make use of common devices and technology, or does it expose audiences to new and novel experiences? Empathy between designers and audiences is crucial in creating interactive media experiences that are not frustrating. Considering audience engagement as a form of user experience (UX) design enables organizations to create meaningful and memorable interactions.
The notes in this notebook consider user experience for the exhibition of interactive media in virtual and augmented reality, mobile, desktop, and browser-based or online platforms. Digital technology affords opportunities for audiences to connect with art outside of galleries and institutions. With basic hardware and an internet connection, audiences can connect with culture from the comfort of their home, offering experience to audiences with access restrictions. Interactive media is often best experienced in ways that a public gallery setting is not well suited for: durationally and repeatedly—for example getting lost and wandering around a virtual world.
Exploring these affordances unleashes a dizzying array of decisions for the organizer. Alongside empathy for the audience, the organizer must consider the interactive media itself. What are the needs and limitations of the artwork? “Interactive media” can contain any number of media forms within, including but not limited to audio, 3D objects, videos, webpages, algorithms, and specialized hardware. Exhibiting interactive artwork requires balancing the needs of the artwork with those of the audience. This balancing act is performed through the technology used in the presentation of the artwork. Therefore, the choice of exhibition technology and platform must be informed by the needs of both audience and artwork.
The notes within this notebook examine the affordances of common interactive platforms, highlighting both the problems they solve and those they create for their audiences. We include remarks from our personal experiences about why we’ve chosen to work with certain platforms in the past, and practical suggestions for implementation. Our suggestions are more like design strategies rather than directions, as constantly changing technology would quickly make this document outdated. Our guidance is directed at organizers creating experiences where audiences are remotely accessing the work, but can also apply to organizations creating onsite installations.
Building custom platforms vs working within existing constraints
When organizing an interactive experience, the exhibition designer must choose between finding an existing platform or building a custom one.
In truth, you will always be using existing infrastructure, whether it is a programming language, game engine, computer hardware, the internet, or the electrical grid! And every infrastructure system can create new problems while solving others.
In the past ten years, a number of consumer-facing applications have been created to facilitate interactive experiences. These include a number of artist-focused platforms that give creators access to novel technology like AR or 360° video through proprietary software. Often these companies do not last long. For organizations working to promote this type of media, they can find that their exhibitions are unsupported by devices a year later. The risk of choosing an existing commercial platform is that the control of the exhibition is quite beyond the organizer’s/curator’s/artist’s hands. The higher up in the stack of dependencies the platform sits, the more at risk of sudden changes or collapse. The lower down—or as programmers call it, “closer to the machine”—the platform a digital exhibition is built upon, the greater the degree of control the designer and artists have over the project’s lifetime.
Additionally, any platform is a medium in and of itself, and even the most ephemeral of social media websites can be used to present artwork that is responding to the context in a meaningful and transformative way. This applies to using game engines, web development, and any artists working their way through the stack. Interactive digital art exhibition design is a necessarily multi-disciplinary and creative act, akin to any collaborative art project, with the addition of complex technological challenges when custom solutions are pursued.
Despite these challenges, interactive digital media exhibitions offer audiences the most cutting-edge and experimental insights into the technology of our day. Having a knowledgeable co-organizer, experienced consultant, or developer on your team greatly improves the audience’s experience and overall success of the project.
Additional resources to consider alongside this note:
Organizing interactive media experiences can be challenging for small organizations with limited resources. Consider reviewing the following note on project management before undergoing a large project: Understanding Key Project Constraints in Grassroots Cultural Contexts
Those interested in the creation of custom platforms may also find food for thought in the note Interview Questions and Consideration for Digital Platforms.
Additional Considerations for Interactive Media Exhibitions
Browser-based experiences of interactive media art
Chances are, you’re probably reading this through a web browser right now. Browser-based exhibition solves a lot of problems for audiences; it is most likely a piece of software already on your computer, no downloading is required, and it can be agnostic of the user’s operating system and hardware. It might even support mobile access, depending on the artwork’s features and constraints.
Mobile experiences of interactive media arts
The best computer people have access to might be the one inside their pocket. Accessing artwork either through a browser, platform, or custom application occurs through smartphone interfaces and practices that are already part of daily routines. However, the vast range of hardware and operating systems on the market can create some frustration when projects don’t work on a user’s particular device.
Augmented Reality (AR) experiences of interactive media art
As AR generally occurs on smartphone devices, the same advantages of pocket-ready accessibility apply as for mobile experiences of interactive media. AR continues to be a novelty to most audiences. While many will be familiar with the technology from games like Pokemon GO or social media filters, it can be challenging to those who have never experienced it before.
Virtual Reality (VR) experiences of interactive media art
VR presents the most convincing rebuttal to the so-called immersive fallacy by integrating audiences with the digital experience mere centimeters from their eyeballs. However, mass adoption of VR hardware is a vanishing horizon, as demonstrated by Meta’s lackluster Metaverse results of 2021-22. These specialized devices are not common household items. Instead, developing VR that has cross-platform compatibility adds significant overhead in terms of design and programming time.
Multi-user experiences of interactive media art
The space of a gallery is often shared with other audience members. A multi-user digital interactive experience elicits a similar social function. Multi-user digital experiences make explicit the primary quality of a computer network, to connect people, and multi-user digital exhibitions add art into that mix. If accessed remotely on personal devices, multi-user experiences can bring the feeling of an art gallery experience to the user’s device by seeing (and possibly hearing) other synchronous visitors.
Implementing interactive media in onsite installation
Organizations with dedicated exhibition space should consider if their project would benefit from an onsite installation. Depending on resources, onsite installation can offer audiences an enhanced experience by providing them with pre-loaded hardware or a gallery attendant to facilitate access. Installation of these projects will often require the artist or a knowledgeable technician to assist with setup. Any onsite installation will benefit from a set of written instructions. Write tech instructions as plainly as possible—leave artspeak for artist statements!
Digital Exhibition Collaborators
In the development of digital exhibitions, it’s important to understand an artist’s relationship with their technology.
Pilot Projects
A critical part of developing DETAIL was the pilot projects. These three digital exhibitions informed the prefabs and templates.
Resources
Build your own digital exhibition spaces with our step-by-step guides and technical resources.